Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  It was at Waccamaw Academy I met my first friend, a round-faced girl named Dora who liked to eat handfuls of dog kibble and whose mother advised matriculation into the circuit of pageants that fostered all the little girls of future means, including Dora. Just like my dad had a string of bars to perform at, so the girl children of the county had stages erected to show off their bodies in malls both shopping and strip. In a culture that valued more highly its barriers than the diligent or lucky few who managed to scramble over them, it must have seemed like an opportunity for advancement. Mom’s father had never owned a pair of shoes until enlisting in the Air Force, and she and her sisters relied on the generosity of an aunt to sew their church clothes for most of their childhood. Just a generation between naked poverty and literal pageantry. We want things to be easy for those we love, to spare them pain, of course, and to spare ourselves the suffering by proxy. Pink. The color I knew as winking Venus flytraps. Bubble gum in squares. Calamine lotion for sunburn and chicken pox. A color I would learn to hate as I was pinned and sashed into its various shades for the length of my time at Waccamaw Academy. I would be socializing with the children of the oldest and richest families in Horry County, whose great-grandparents had named the town and built the railroad that replaced the ferry that had been carting day-trippers across the Pee Dee River to New Town.

  Nana had grown up in the shadow of Miss Sun Fun pageants, watching girls less lovely than she wave in their swimsuits from parade floats every year as she worked double-time at the bank and at Myrtle Beach High School. For both Nana and Mom, for whatever else they endured, being considered beautiful by men made the world a little less hard for them. I had inherited none of their looks, resembling neither of these women who put stock in their most valuable commodity, as it was shown to them. Nana used to say, “If you marry a Jones, all your children come out looking like Joneses,” which is what I looked like.

  Dora was an only child, and her house felt like an enchanted hideaway to me, a different reality built inside a stilt-raised beach house that was secluded instead among swamp forests and live oaks draped with moss and cottonmouths next to the Waccamaw River. Before we were allowed to go downstairs and play on their lawn, which overlooked the river, her father made us wait inside while he and his shotgun patrolled the area for water moccasins that slithered up from the river and dropped from the treetops onto the grass. Like the upper classes everywhere, Dora’s family liked to hunt, and pictures of her grinning beside her father in matching fatigues with an assortment of newly dead creatures, fish, quail, ducks hanging from the mouths of their hunting dogs, did not suggest to me the actions required to get to that point of posing. These photographs decorated the walls of their home, accenting the stuffed and tastefully shellacked mallards posed forever in midflight above the fireplace. Their violence was a controlled one that could be mounted and shown off. Our violence was never spoken of. A shameful secret. Only once was I strapped on the back of a four-wheeler and forced to accompany their party as they shot the deer I loved to spot between the pines on the side of the road.

  Occasionally after school, Dora’s mother, Miss Dorothy, would take us out for afternoon drinks, as it were, an event that expected a certain level of decorum. I politely crossed my ankles and kept my elbows off the table, as she’d instructed once before. Miss Dorothy ordered a round of Shirley Temples for the three of us. “Stick your chest out, girls,” she corrected our posture continually and in any location, restaurant booths, school parking lot, their kitchen, or on pageant stage, and it irked me even then to be coached to put first and foremost the fated legal tender of my gender’s strongest currency. Still, every time I lugged myself into the back seat of her sports utility vehicle, I hoped we would end up at the dark restaurant with the black leather booths and fizzy pink drinks with prim red cherries on top. It was a luxury, their manners somewhat exotic at first introduction. I had been to bars before or after shifts with my parents, played with peanut shells discarded on the floor as Dad sang onstage, but we could not afford sit-down restaurants then, though the Joneses owned quite a few. It was a treat when Dad and I slid into his pickup truck to go get biscuits from the drive-through place called Oliver’s. Such was the contrast of my early childhood: we were barely able to pay for groceries, and yet I received fur coats and collectible dolls as Christmas gifts from Nana and Granddaddy. It was just the way I knew things. I dreaded Christmases, knowing that for gifts I’d receive elaborate costumes of my own that I would then be forced to parade. Like the pink suede cowgirl skirt and vest, complete with fringe and boots. And the white rabbit-fur coat and matching muff, as if I were Natasha Rostov. Nana only gave me what she must have dreamed of herself as a girl, and I was luckier than Chris and Brian, for whom Granddaddy cussed at the thought of buying milk for their cereal. That there was family money floating around out there somewhere just out of reach was like a life raft in the deep end of a pool, and that helped us sleep most nights. Riches that were out of place among the spare treats my parents afforded for us, after months of layaway at Brendle’s and Roses. At birthdays and Christmases, Nana gave Mom money and directed her as to what to buy for her, so that her pride would not suffer at having no gifts to give. Palm-size compacts in enameled and bejeweled shapes hid waxy Estée Lauder scents. Leopards and carousels like the one at the Pavilion, sea turtles and sea-shells, and butterflies and cabochons remind me always of White Diamonds and White Linen. If she smelled like Elizabeth Taylor, she could be more like her in other ways. “You know,” Nana would say of Taylor, “she’s had eight husbands.”

  Comparing, comparing, always I was comparing. A pedagogical device picked up from homework, coloring books, magazines for children. Spot the differences in these pictures, these stories, these bodies, these lives. The feeling that I was out of place continued to grow the more I compared. I was a quiet and responsible child, but bossy and bookish enough to inflict concern. It was me and not a brother or cousin who led our way down the line of hotels on Ocean Boulevard, in and out of pools at the oceanfront hotels. Yet I was the only one told to cross my legs or sit quiet, but also stick out my chest somehow. To put down my homework and help fix supper. “You’re the most responsible,” Mom said as a compliment when I complained that I’d rather be participating in pine-cone throwing or freeze tag. An assessment of truth, but only because responsibility was foisted upon my little suntanned shoulders. Responsibility was never, ever expected from the boys, most only a year or two younger. A different shade of anger, the silent resentment that smolders in all women, was beginning to rival the fear and hatred that I saw in Granddaddy. At least the anger of men counted.

  Where my new friend took to the pageant life with the same fearlessness that propelled her to jump into the Waccamaw, I was becoming an anxious child. In addition to dresses and bows, I needed professional photographs taken for some pageants. I cried so much at the prospect, Mom had to sneak my cat into sessions inside her pocketbook. Midnight, I called her. A black stray taken in after a neighbor ran over our ginger tabby and left it in a black garbage bag with a note of minor apology. My brothers teased she would be bad luck, or that I must be a witch to have her devotion. She followed me around and slept curled up beneath Bandit’s chin under our kitchen table. My mom was brought to fits of sneezing by her presence, along with a bill from the pediatrician when my brother Jason caught cat-scratch fever from her tiny sharp claws.

  On mornings before local pageants, Mom lifted me to sit on the bathroom counter and have my hair bound in thin heated rollers. The bathroom door was left open so we could hear the morning TV we usually watched in bed. In the mirror, I could see my hair in sideways loops that made even rows of steaming pink rubber, each bubble of wispy brown resembling hollow circles of the cool brass knuckles my dad kept on the dresser. The sharp stink of burning hair and a cloud of Aquanet hovered under the vanity lights. “Being beautiful is painful. It’s work,” Mom said. Most of what I retain about particular pageants comes from pictures of me wi
th numbers pinned to the hem of a dress. In what would have been one of the first, my dress looks borrowed and too big. I cannot tell if I am really smiling or if the lipstick has smeared. I can feel my mom and Midnight out of the frame. What sticks out to me is the getting ready and the embarrassment of walking around afterward in all that makeup. In a dress made to draw attention when I wanted it the least. The feeling of deep shame heating my whole body, as if there were another me filled with fire standing right beside me like a red shadow. We usually went to Nana’s house afterward, as we did after everything, and it was a favorite thing, even all dressed up, to walk in and find the living room full of my dad and his brothers in the mood to tell stories. These stories were recollected among the brothers over and over, as we asked them to repeat the stories of Drunken Jack, Alice Flagg, Blackbeard. And just as we asked them, they asked their mama for her stories. Nana was the ultimate keeper. Her sons were freer in their telling, but she knew everything.

  I remember walking up her patio after one pageant, stepping on the fallen pink of crape myrtle petals, and hearing for the first time one particular story. The squish of the teal shag under my shoes, the smell of coffee, butter beans, Nana’s perfume. My brothers playing under nobody’s supervision, as Dad and Uncle Les debated something only Nana could clarify.

  “Mama, I wanna know more about this trial,” said Leslie, her middle son, blond and blue-eyed like her. It must have been the year the TV movie came out about it, but that would place it on the edge of too late. In 1978, Nana had been a juror on the trial for one of South Carolina’s then most-famous murderers, Rudolph Tyner. A made-for-TV movie that followed the son of one of his victims, Vengeance: The Story of Tony Cimo, aired in 1991. She and the other jurors were sequestered at a roadside motel next to the courthouse in Conway. The day she got picked for duty, the sheriff, Junior Brown, escorted her home from the courthouse and told her to pack a suitcase under his supervision. He wouldn’t let her talk to anybody.

  “Les, you know I can’t talk to you about it, son.” Her voice stretched high when she got upset. The trial itself had been years ago, but she maintained that she could not breach confidence, though I suspect it was an excuse not to talk about it. Not to think about it even a little. She told me that the only time she feared for her life was in the room with Rudolph Tyner.

  “He was a mean fella and he just stared right at you.” My uncle had her going now. “He was guilty as I don’t know what. I watched their son, that Tony Cimo, go at that New York boy Tyner right in the courtroom. Just jumped at him. But now once he got put on death row, you remember what happened?” she was asking her sons, but I was wide-eyed and hooked.

  Tyner would be murdered on death row by the most famous serial killer the state has yet produced, a man who claimed before his execution to have raped and murdered at least a hundred women. The first woman he abducted was a hitchhiker. He left her for dead in a swamp, though she was living still and managed to crawl out, and he boasted it was the best night of his life. “Well, Pee Wee Gaskins, he was already on death row.” She had her storytelling rhythm going, matching her sentences with the rocks of her chair. “He was a real famous serial killer. And this boy Tony Cimo hired him to kill Tyner before he was supposed to be executed by the state. Now, Gaskins had this radio that Tyner was always asking to borrow. I guess he must have heard him playing it from his cell. Well, Gaskins fixed this radio up as a bomb, and when Tyner turned it on, it exploded and killed him. Blew his head off, I reckon.”

  Nobody was listening except me, I realized. Dad and his brothers had asked her about it, and then gone outside to check on the boys. I knew they had really gone out for cigarettes. How different would her stories have been if she’d had girls instead of more Jones boys? Would the repetitions she was asked for be less violent? She must have known that I was always listening to her even then. “You don’t want to hear me talk so much,” she said on the phone, after years of Granddaddy’s abuses and her sons’ walking away. “Nana, that’s why I call.” Remembering is survival, and beauty the easiest faith.

  I walked back to the Doll Room to change clothes. “I started collecting because I never had any daughters,” she told me, the longing still in her voice forty years after she started collecting these dolls in the mid-1970s. Her friend Tommy took her to a showroom up in Columbia, where, surrounded by stick-straight models of costumed, expressionless, and tiny women, something clicked for her and she filled an empty bedroom with walls full of them. These dolls were shells as empty as the whelks my hermit crab outgrew, but to her each one was a life she might have had, a crinolined cipher into which she could imagine an escape. By the time I was born, she had hundreds of them displayed in glass cases lining the walls of the Doll Room, a bedroom that, when her boys were old enough and she had abandoned her dream of daughters, she carpeted in the shag of the era in pink. A deep near-purple orchid. The walls were not papered, but they might as well have been done up in yellow. The love seat was a print of butterflies and flowers, and sat under the brief window that separated the two display cases filled with the other lives she might have led. There were the president’s wives. A series of fairy-tale girls, their size and form no different than the grown women like Mrs. Lincoln. Little Red Riding Hood with her tiny wicker basket, and Cinderella, who wore blue. The dolls were a small liberty for Nana, though they felt sad and caged to me. Nana sometimes bought two of the same doll, one for her and one for me. On top of the carbon-copy collection she was giving me, she reminded me consistently that I would inherit hers one day. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with all these dolls,” she’d say.

  Did going back over this violence she was summoned to judge make her feel safer? I wonder. What she suffered was nothing compared with the bloody evidence left behind by murderers and serial killers. At least her husband was not a killer. I imagine she also liked being treated as an adult. Having a job, however gruesome, after being forced to quit hers as a bank teller decades before just because my granddaddy wouldn’t have a wife of his working. Jury duty gave her a real reason to leave her house.

  One raining gray day after school, Mom drove us to a seamstress’s house. I looked out the window, noting that the blur of pinewoods flying past was only broken up by trailers and the strewn contents of their yards. Faded plastic wading pools filled with fallen leaves, a few painted wooden signs with PSYCHIC or PALM READING painted on, and speedboats propped upon cinder blocks in the yards. The drizzle had not let up, and a favorite thing to do when it was raining and Mom was speeding was to roll the window halfway down and stick my hand out, to feel the drops of rain as stinging needles pricking my palm. I can’t deny that even then some of my hurt was self-inflicted and sought. Nana already sat at a kitchen table with a mug of black coffee in her hand, and she chatted easily with the seamstress, as she could with anyone.

  “Can’t we go with something a little lighter? Maybe a pink?” Nana asked, after the seamstress held a deck of reds and oranges against me. Nana had the checkbook, willingly given over by her husband for a grandkid who didn’t belong to Mike. Mom and Nana went through yards of fabric. More tulle and lace. Opalescent polyester. Beading and sequins. I stood on a little box while layers of cloth were draped over each shoulder. Pins stuck into my sides, holding folds and creases together. I knew well by this fitting how to bear the discomfort of smiling politely when you’d most like to cry from fear or, more often, anger.

  The morning before my last pageant, Mom and I picked up Nana from her house and we set out for Columbia. We passed the street famous in Conway for a fat oak tree that stands in the center of the road, unaware of its odd placement. As old as the Declaration of Independence. The city paved around its history rather than raze it. George Washington could have stopped here to unscroll a papyrus map and double-check his directions on the way to King’s Highway. When my dress had been finished, Nana arranged for a professional portrait to be made of me wearing it. A pink bodice and layer-cake tiers of marshmallow skirt.
A matching pink bow for my hair. Lipstick and blush. Midnight the cat unseen in the picture purring away on my lap. This pageant was much bigger than the ones I’d been doing around town. Several hundred little girls were entered in this one, and there would be several phases to this competition. A swimsuit competition was tacked on, and little girls were expected to strut around more than half-naked for a bunch of grown men with nowhere else to be in the middle of the day. On the family piano, the one Nana bought from Uncle Jack for me to have lessons, there is a photograph of me in a white one-piece with a red rose and some rhinestones hot-glued up the straps. I’m all done up in paints and powders, posing with one hand on a not-yet-there hip and fuming behind a smile.

  Though I would be judged on my appearance in a bathing suit the next day, it did not occur to me yet to worry about the shape and size of my body. Both Mom and Nana constantly dieted, and it became my brothers and me who reminded and sometimes begged our mom to eat. Most of my childhood she lived off saltine crackers with peanut butter and Coca-Cola. Even as I watched them shield themselves from the crude jibes of men and the sneering insults of other women by making themselves smaller, I couldn’t help but understand that they wanted some part of themselves to disappear. Nana claimed to diet more than she seemed to lose weight. She was always eating a piece of cake or white bread with butter. “I shouldn’t be eatin’ this, but it’s so good. It’ll ruin my figure,” she said but with a giggle and a wink. The joke was that she was fat already, which she wasn’t. Granddaddy liked her always thinner, as if he wanted to make her so small she’d shrink herself gone one day. She liked to share with me her happy memories of their marriage, as if trying to say that it wasn’t always all bad. To convince herself. Granddaddy would often promise her something new and expensive if she lost a certain amount of weight. Many of her most prized, most valuable possessions were acquired after weeks or months of fasting on grapefruit or cabbage-soup diets from women’s magazines she had in a pile by her rocking chair. She interpreted her prizes as appreciation for her body, though I cannot help but see them as packaging to wrap around his perfect-looking wife when they went out to business or family events, before going home and raising a hand. No wonder she loved these accessories that were shown off at public events. He treated her halfway better out in public.